Urban morphology and project consulting: a Berlin experience

Abstract

The city of Berlin has been engaged for over 20 years in a long-term project of repairs to the urban tissue that was dismembered during the war and by a half-century of political division. These projects have been undertaken with the greatest of care, on the basis of morphogenetic studies that have informed master plans and extremely detailed regulations. Without questioning the utility of these planning and building standards, there is a fear that they will hypertrophy and end up limiting the work of architectural and urban design to that of pure execution. Producing an inventory of the collective values that should bring lasting benefits to all the city's users is one thing, while making provision in the arrangement of the actual space for the compatibility of these ideals with the individual demands of the different contractors from case to case is another. This paper emphasizes the idea that the task of reconciliation requires a specific inventiveness. After a presentation of the conceptual relation between urban morphology and building typology which underlies the neo-rationalist approach to the urban project, the paper examines how this methodology applies to the resolution of problems by dissecting a proposal formulated for the international competition of 1996 for the completion of Pariser Platz facing the famous Brandenburg Gate.